


A Soft Reverberation

by psocoptera



Category: A Wrinkle in Time (2018), Kairos (O'Keefe) Series - Madeleine L'Engle
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Universes, Bullying, Dementia, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 14:11:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16451465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: A week after rescuing her dad and brother from Camazotz, Meg has a surprising visitor.





	A Soft Reverberation

**Author's Note:**

> This story draws from both the 2018 movie and the book series.

The week after her dad comes back is the best and worst week of Meg's life. It seems like it shouldn't be both, it should just be the best, flat out. Her dad is _back_ , and she _did_ that, and it's not that she isn't happy, every time she comes into a room and he's really there.

But maybe it makes sense that after things wrinkle, they end up creased and doubled up. Every time she leaves the house it's like going back to another world where her dad being back doesn't matter. She had always thought that if he would only come back then everything would be okay, and it had even felt like that, in that last glorious tesseract - like all the crumpled bits of her life were smoothing out. Veronica had waved! It was a new era!

But Meg is still Meg, and school is still school, and so even when she's home there's this layer of bad under everything good, that it still wasn't enough, and now she doesn't even have something to wish for to fix it. Except to wish she was the kind of person who could just be happy about her dad instead of a human flexagon of mixed-up feelings.

She catches herself thinking about how many different feelings that would be, if she were a hexahexaflexagon, and decides she needs some fresh air.

Out of her room, she can hear her dad talking to Charles Wallace in the living room, but they don't call out to her and she doesn't interrupt them. She grabs an old bamboo beach mat from the back hall and slips out the back door. 

It's evening, the kind of bright barely-darker-than-afternoon when nobody wants to make dinner yet. It always feels weird to Meg to just lay down on the lawn - too open, too unguarded - and so with a a little wiggling and clambering she does what she always does and unrolls the beach mat under the dome of the geodesic climbing structure.

They used to have a whole cover for the dome, she and Charles Wallace, back when they wanted to pretend it was a cave or a moon base or a spaceship. Two big nylon halves, tied together at the top and along the great circle down the sides, with some extra flaps and cut-outs for airlocks or viewing ports or cave entrances. It's so weird to look up at the soothing geometry of the dome and think that she's actually been on other planets now, and not even inside some sort of sensible human-built structure. Just her human self, moving between worlds in ways little Meg never could have imagined.

She closes her eyes for a moment, concentrating on the reassuring solidity of the ground underneath her, and when she opens them again there's an old white woman sitting on one of the lowest crossbars of the dome, staring out across Meg's backyard.

"Oh!" Meg says, sitting halfway up - she hadn't heard the gate, or anything, although of course there's been plenty of coming and going lately by other means. The woman isn't _obviously_ anything unusual, with her sensible, nondescript old-lady clothes and slightly untidy grey-white hair, but the more Meg looks at her, the more she's convinced that she isn't actually sitting on the crossbar of the dome. She's close, but there's something not quite right about the angle, or the way her hip intersects with the bar to the side.

"Um," Meg says. "Hello?"

The old woman ignores her.

"Hi," Meg tries again. She sits up all the way. "I'm Meg. Are you a Mrs.?"

The woman turns and looks at her, and Meg feels a weird shock as their eyes meet, like two complicated patterns suddenly overlaying to make a recognizable picture. Only she can't tell what it is before the feeling's gone again.

The old woman blinks a few times and squints in an old-ladyish way.

"Oh, how interesting," she says finally, eyes widening, breaking into a smile. "My goodness."

Meg smiles back uncertainly.

"I'm not a Mrs.," the woman says, "Or, I am, but - just in the normal way. Not like _that_."

"Oh," Meg says. "But you know them?"

"Oh yes," the woman says. Her eyes go a little distant.

"Were you looking for them?" Meg asks.

The old woman raises her eyebrows. "Not particularly."

"I guess I'm just wondering what you're doing in my backyard," Meg blurts.

The woman raises her eyebrows again. "A good question. And what if I told you that we are both in the north pasture?" She waves her hand, gesturing around her. Her hand passes through the upper struts of the dome like they're not there, and then suddenly the dome _isn't_ there, and everything around them is different. The woman is sitting on a large flat rock, and Meg is down on the ground beside it surrounded by tall grass and dandelions. There's woods in a couple of directions, leafy and startlingly green.

"Did we just tesser?" Meg asks. It hadn't felt like it at all. "Are we on another planet?"

"We're in Connecticut," the woman says, not unkindly. "In my frame of reference I've _been_ in Connecticut. But this has always been a good place to meet people." She gives the rock a little pat. "Come sit!"

Meg eyes the rock, a little dubiously, and stands up. She doesn't hit her head on the dome, so whatever kind of overlapping of spaces brought the woman into her backyard, she seems to be solidly in Connecticut now. She turns and sits down on the rock, a polite distance from the old woman.

"It's a good place to watch the stars," the woman tells her. Meg looks up automatically, but the sky is about the same color as it was back home, maybe a little paler, with greyish clouds back behind the trees.

When she looks back, the woman is staring at her intently.

"Your name is Meg Murry," she says. "And you know about tesseracts."

"Yes," Meg says.

The woman reaches out, and Meg flinches back a little, assuming she's going for her hair - white women are terrible about that - but instead she taps her index finger on the corner of Meg's glasses.

"I like your frames," she says.

"Thank you," Meg says by rote. That weird almost-recognizable feeling is skittering around her again, like a mathematical solution she _knows_ she should be able to get, but can't put her finger on the trick of yet. If x equals Meg, and y equals this lady... 

"Why did you want to talk to me here, instead of in my backyard?"

The old woman shakes her head a little, smiling a rueful smile.

"I'm afraid it's a retreat to old habits. I have twenty things I should be doing, but I come out here. I find something that I didn't know could happen... and I come back here."

The woman tilts her head. Her hands in her lap make small, abstract movements.

"But I can almost see how the math would work... the symmetry function..."

She's muttering to herself, eyes unfocused. Meg knows that look from both of her parents, when some sudden idea is so arresting that they can't help but lose track of the person in front of them for a moment. Meg waits patiently, looking around at the grass, considering the delicate geometry of the dandelions. She'd like to pick one to blow it, except that might be rude, as a guest here.

"You're not from a Might-Have-Been, are you," the old woman says, addressing Meg this time, and Meg looks up and slaps on a paying-attention face. "Or a Projection, or any of that. You're the real Meg Murry."

Meg smiles at her nervously. "Yes?" It's a little unnerving to hear that her reality had been in question, although the old woman doesn't sound suspicious at all, just surprised, or maybe fascinated.

"This is an odd request," the woman says. "But would you be willing to come with me to see my mother? She's in the house not far from here, and it would be - " she hesitates " - a kindness to her, to see you."

"Your mother," Meg echoes. It's strange to think of someone so old having a mother, although, the math unfolds quickly, a seventy-year-old woman could easily have a hundred-year-old mother, that's not that uncommon. "Um. Sure."

Maybe she should be cautious, but she can't help but feel that there's something fundamentally safe about the rock where she's sitting, and the old woman sitting on it. And so, by extension, the woman's mother... The old woman stands up and begins to lead the way down an overgrown path through the grass, and Meg stands up and follows her.

She follows the woman along the path, grass tickling her legs. They pass two more big rocks, taller ones, and then Meg can see the house where they must be heading. It's big, and complicated - there's a tall, white wooden part that looks old, a long, low, many-windowed part that looks newer, and a few more odd wings here and there in stone and white-painted brick. They climb over a low stone wall - the old woman is over it before Meg can even think of asking her if she needs help - and weave through an oddly dense grove of spruce trees, up onto a porch and into the house, into an empty living room.

"Hello!" the woman calls.

"We're in here!" someone calls back.

"Of course," the old woman says under her breath.

Meg follows her through a kitchen and out into one of the stone wings of the house, which Meg is surprised to see is lined with the familiar black countertops of laboratory benches. There are two people standing there, a young white woman with a ponytail and a mildly exasperated expression, and a very old, shrunkenly old white woman with short-cropped brilliantly white hair and a cane.

"We're having a time," the young woman says, smiling a little painfully. The very old woman makes a dismissive noise.

"I can't find my microscope!" the very old woman says. "That's a high-precision instrument and the isolation table has to be balanced, you can't just move it. How am I supposed to get anything done without my microscope?"

"It's okay, Mother," the first old woman says, moving forward to put a hand on her arm. "You donated it to the college, remember? The community college? For their science initiative?"

The very old woman pulls her arm away. "Well, that was generous," she says, shaking her head in obvious disapproval. The not-as-old woman - Meg's old woman, Meg decides to call her - reaches out to her arm again, and she jerks it away irritably. "And stop calling me that, whoever you are."

Meg's old woman sighs. "Andrea," she says, addressing the young woman, "Would you mind putting in the laundry? I'll stay with my mother and our guest for now."

Andrea glances at Meg and nods. "Sure thing," she says. "She's on time for her afternoon meds, but she didn't eat very much. I can fix her something once I get the machine started."

"That would be great," Meg's old woman says. Apparently the sudden appearance of random teenagers isn't something anyone feels the need to ask about or explain, because Andrea heads back into the kitchen without further discussion.

The very old woman makes a face behind her back as she leaves, and then turns her attention to Meg.

"Oh," she says suddenly. "Meg, darling. I didn't hear you come in."

Meg jumps a little. Meg's old woman makes an encouraging face, and motions to her to come closer.

"Um," Meg says. "Hello."

"You look beautiful," the very old woman says, peering at her and beaming. "I feel like we haven't had any time together in ages. You've done something new with your hair."

It's just up in a quick bun, from when Meg's plans involved lying on a mat in her backyard and not mysteriously translocating to Connecticut, but at least the very old woman isn't trying to touch it. "Thank you."

"Are you hungry? I could start some dinner, only I can't find my Bunsen burner. Can you imagine, how could I lose track of something like that?"

Meg looks around the room. It's pretty bare, only the bench tops and an empty glassware rack clearly connoting laboratory. She can see a few worn spots on the bench tops and floor where instruments might have stood, and some dusty, out-of-date-looking reference manuals on a bookshelf.

"We had to take out the gas hookups," Meg's old woman says. Meg isn't sure if she's explaining this to Meg, or reminding the very old woman.

"Bah," the very old woman says. "You've never minded Bunsen-burner stew, have you, Meg?"

Meg's mom has always been pretty strict about not bringing food out to the lab, even when she's been running back and forth between an experiment and dinner. "Um," Meg says. "I like liquid nitrogen ice cream?" It's the only science-y food she can think of, her father pouring carefully from the dewar into the bowl of cream and milk.

"Oh!" the very old woman says. "Liquid nitrogen... that's clever! I like that, Meg. Something you thought up with Calvin?"

Logically, it shouldn't be any stranger for these women to know about Calvin than for them to recognize Meg, but Meg's face still goes hot. The Calvin situation is not something she's prepared to discuss with strangers, no matter how friendly they seem.

"Why don't we see if Andrea's found anything in the kitchen," Meg's old woman interjects, rescuing Meg from having to answer. The very old woman rolls her eyes but starts shuffling along in the direction of the kitchen.

Andrea isn't there, but there's a plate of something sliced and crumbly out on the counter, some kind of banana bread or zucchini cake or something of that sort. The very old woman makes a slow beeline for it. She picks up a slice and starts munching, back to them.

"Please feel free to help yourself," Meg's old woman says to Meg, a little bit loudly, and the very old woman turns around and blinks.

"Oh, _Meg_ ," she says happily. "I'm so glad you're here, you've been so busy. All of you! Even little Charles Wallace! Of course the twins always have so many sports, and clubs... and Dennys even kept up with the flute through medical school, I remember that..." She looks Meg up and down, suddenly seeming confused. "You can't still be in high school, Meg."

"I'm in middle school," Meg says. The very old woman's confusion is unsettling, it makes Meg nervous. She picks up a slice of the cake-bread and tastes apples.

"Middle school," the very old woman repeats. "They built the middle school when the high school became too crowded. But you never went to the middle school, you went straight from the village school to Regional. That was a hard couple of years, wasn't it, until you met Calvin, and Alex came back..."

The apple bread feels gluey in Meg's mouth. "My dad just got back," she says, swallowing paste. "And nothing's better at all, and what do you mean I never went to middle school, how do you know me and my brother and my dad but not know that?"

Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which had been surprising and alarming and hard to believe at first, but there had been a definiteness about them that was reassuring. They had been sure of themselves even when Meg wasn't sure of them, or herself, or anything. The very old woman has had flashes of that, but she doesn't seem to have a very sure grip on it; even as Meg watches, her face is going more bewildered and worried, like a light dimming, or an image going out of focus.

"You're my Meglet," the very old woman says. "My Meglet Megaparsec Meg, but you shouldn't be here, you're not - I'm not - "

She looks down at her hands, one holding apple bread, one holding her cane, and abruptly lifts her cane and whacks it violently against the edge of the counter.

Meg runs.

Maybe that's foolish, she's faced the IT and this is just one very old woman, but there's something awful about the way she's upset that Meg can't stand to watch. She can hear her old woman starting to say something behind her, probably trying to calm the very old woman down, but Meg runs right through the living room and the spruce trees and all the way back to the stone wall, where she sits down and tries to collect herself, tries to figure out why she feels so unsettled.

She's not sure how long she sits there before she sees her old woman making her way towards her through the spruce trees.

"Andrea's with my mother," the old woman says, sitting herself down on the wall a little ways from Meg, "And here I am with you. I am so very sorry, Meg. I thought it would be best if I let you interact naturally, without imposing my own hopes on you, but I let you go into that unprepared, and that was unfair to you. We're never at our best when we're kept in the dark."

"She gets mixed up," Meg says tentatively, like a peace offering. "Your mother."

"The past is very alive for her," the old woman says. "She had a long and brilliant career and a long and happy marriage and those were the pillars of her house. And when my father - " She breaks off. "Anyways. I think I should explain why I wanted her to see you." 

Meg nods, waits.

"She - she's always been good at looking closely, at seeing what wasn't obvious, so I thought..." The old woman takes a breath. "I don't suppose you've learned to kythe yet."

Meg is pretty sure her lack of understanding is apparent.

"No? Well, that's all right. Would you try something for me? Just think about the dandelions, what makes them all the same... think about what's left of the dandelion after you blow it. Is that the real dandelion? Is it the yellow flower?"

Meg isn't sure why they're talking about dandelions, but maybe it's like balancing on one foot to see things on other planets. She tries to picture everything she can about dandelions.

"Now look at me and tell me who you think I am, whatever wild, impossible idea occurs to you," the old woman says, and Meg looks up right into her eyes, which are suddenly tunnels, or pools, or mirrors.

"Oh," Meg says. "You're me."

**

There's a weird minute, or five, or an hour, Meg isn't sure, while the world seems to swing around her, like the whole vector of gravity has changed and the plane of her location is wobbling on the sphere. She has no idea what it means that the old woman is also Meg Murry, or how that's possible - she's not going to grow up to be a white lady in her old age, she's pretty sure - but she's also sure in some deep unshakeable way that the old woman _is_ Meg Murry, the way math is undeniable once you've followed the logic. x equals Meg, y equals the old woman, x equals y. She holds on to the stone wall with both hands until her thoughts feel clearer. Maybe it's only been a moment after all; the old Meg - the other Meg - doesn't look impatient or concerned, just calmly waiting.

"She thought I was you," Meg says. "Your mother. She thought I was her daughter."

"She recognized you," the other Meg says. "She doesn't recognize me any more, usually - sometimes if her grandchildren or great-grandchildren are around, that's enough to center her in the present, where I'm a grandmother myself. But mostly she expects Meg to be someone young, and she'll ask for you - for _me_ \- when I'm sitting right there."

"I'm sorry," Meg says.

"It's hard," the other Meg says matter-of-factly. "But I could tell she was very happy to see you. So thank you for that."

"I'm sorry I ran," Meg says.

"That's all right." The other Meg is quiet for a moment. "Would you like to talk about it? About school? I don't know if it's hard for you the same way it was for me, but I remember feeling like there wasn't anyone in the same boat as me, and I know we have some things in common at least."

Meg is about to turn her down, and then she realizes she does want to talk about it, and the other Meg is exactly the right mix of familiar and stranger to make Meg feel like she _could_ talk about it.

"KTLA stuck a camera in my face," she says quietly, and the other Meg nods. "And Mr. Jenkins - he's the principal - called me in, and I thought maybe he was going to admit he was wrong about my dad never coming back, but he just lectured me some more about how he expected to see things turn around now. And Veronica -"

She swallows, trying to tell this part in the right order. "The first day back at school, Calvin came to sit with me at lunch. I was still... I was just so happy. We talked about, I don't know. Board games. Logic puzzles. Silly, fun stuff. And then after lunch Veronica found me by my locker, and asked me if I thought Calvin liked me."

Her eyes feel hot, thinking back. She had said _sure_ , or _yeah_ or something, she couldn't really remember. She hadn't been nervous, even with Veronica's whole pack of supporters staring at her. It had felt easy to acknowledge something obviously true. But then Veronica had said "really?" in this incredulous voice, and Meg -

"I said I deserved to be liked. And I wasn't even thinking about, you know, crushes, just that we were definitely friends - or maybe the superposition of both, I don't know - but one of Veronica's friends said 'oh, I bet', and she - she made a, uh, a motion - "

Marina had opened her mouth and bobbed her head over her fist, and Meg knew what that meant, everyone did, and they had all laughed, and Meg had wanted to dissolve into the floor. And she was going to die of mortification all over again if she had to say "the blowjob gesture" to her seventy-year-old alternate self.

"A rude motion," Meg tries.

"Oh, I see," the other Meg says. "She made an implication."

"Right, and it's totally not - I don't - I wouldn't - "

"It's something that doesn't pertain to you right now," the other Meg suggests.

"Thank you," Meg says. "It's not that I don't _ever_ \- I mean, someday - college, I don't know - anyways, I just felt gross." It had been so embarrassing, and when Calvin had found her after school it had been awful to feel everyone staring at them and know what they were thinking. "The next morning there was a condom taped to my locker. And now Calvin doesn't understand why I won't talk to him. And Charles Wallace tells me I'm being absurd, that I should just explain to Calvin, like that wouldn't be even _more_ humiliating."

"I'm sorry," the other Meg says.

They sit for a moment, Meg trying to pretend like she isn't blinking away a few tears.

"I never had a Veronica," the other Meg says. "Not like that. I got in some fights."

Meg tries to picture the other Meg as a teenager who would get in fights. It's hard to imagine.

"Charles Wallace is sometimes so centered he forgets about other people's edges," the other Meg goes on. "And... it's just the two of you? And your parents?"

Meg nods. The other Meg closes her eyes for a moment.

"Well then," she says, voice a little heavy. "It's tempting to tell you that you'll eventually get older, but I know that doesn't do any good in the meantime."

_I guess you would know_ , Meg thinks. It's so strange to think that this other Meg has had a whole grownup-person life but is still recognizably herself, although now that she tries to think about it a little more, she has no idea what it was she recognized or how she did it, or how the other Meg and her mother had known her.

It's very strange, and scary, to think of her own mother not recognizing her someday.

"I could go back," she says slowly. "And talk to your mother again, I mean. It might go better now that I know."

"You really don't have to do that," the other Meg says immediately. "I was taking advantage, to ask you."

"It's okay," Meg says, meaning it. "I got my dad back, and I guess now I'm... someone who can be called on. To help. Like you are, and that's how you knew you could ask me." She realizes it while she's saying it, but she feels sure of it by the time she finishes.

The other Meg smiles. "Well then."

They go back through the spruces and into the house. The other Meg says she'll go find her mother and see how she's doing, and Meg is left alone in the living room.

It's a big space and reminds Meg strongly of her own living room somehow - it's not that any of the specific things in it are the same, but something about them all together, things that look like they've come from all over the world but belong together. There are a couple of tall bookshelves stuffed with books, and side tables with framed photos, and there's an open box on the mantel with a shiny gold medallion in it, a man's head in profile like a giant coin. Meg leans closer, angling her head to read the writing, and jumps back when she reads "Nobel", because she's pretty sure she was just breathing on _somebody's actual Nobel prize_ and that means someone who lived here won a Nobel prize? Is that going to happen in Meg's timeline too??

She turns away from the mantel to one of the tables, heart pounding a little, like it's more innocent to be looking at family pictures than investigating the medal. It only occurs to her after she's picked the first one up that these pictures are also probably full of hints about the future that maybe she's not supposed to have. Well. Too late.

The photo she's picked up has been faded and reddened by time. It's centered around a white woman - the other Meg, Meg realizes, although decades younger. There's a tall red-haired white man standing a little bit behind her, and four children arranged in front of her, the smallest up on her hip. A girl and three boys, going by the clothes.

In the next photo, the other Meg is even younger. She's sitting with a red-haired toddler in her lap on one side of an older white couple who seem likely to be her parents, although the woman is basically unrecognizable as the wizened old lady Meg met earlier. On the other side are three young men, one small and not quite looking at the camera, two a bit older and obviously twins.

The third photo is the smallest, black and white in a brass frame. Four white children in a row. Meg can tell right away that the two in the middle are the same twins from the other picture, which means that the girl in the thick-framed glasses must be the other Meg. Could the little boy, not quite looking at the camera, be the other Meg's Charles Wallace? Or are these friends' children or something?

The last photo looks much brighter and newer than the others. It's a whole mass of young and young-ish people, over a dozen, most of them clearly related but a few of them standing out: a young woman with dark hair who looks Middle Eastern, a young man with dark hair who looks Latino. Adopted children? Significant others? There's a red-haired white woman who might possibly be the girl from the first photo... Meg holds them up together, trying to decide if she can match up the three boys with three of the young men.

"An old friend, a college friend, came to visit me once after I'd just had number six," the other Meg says behind her. Meg puts both photos down quickly.

"One night she had a little too much wine and she said 'Meg, imagine if you'd been popping out papers instead of babies.' I looked across the table at her and asked her if she really thought I would be happier that way, or the world would be a better place. She said that she didn't know about the world, but that _she_ had been looking forward to reading my papers and seeing what kind of work I would do. We had overlapping interests, in our field."

"There were plenty of excuses I could have made - that I was an uncredited collaborator on my husband's work, that I could always go back to the math when the children were older but I couldn't go back to the children when the math was older. We both would have known I was dodging, though."

"What did you say?"

"I told her that I thought love was as powerful a force in the world as anything, and that I had tried to make all my choices from active love. And then she asked whether I thought less of her because she didn't want a family, and I said of course not. And then I think we got onto where she was in the tenure process, or something."

Meg twitches a little. She knows from long experience that she might as well ask to leave the table if her parents' guests start talking about tenure.

"Should you really be telling me all this?" she asks instead. "I mean, about your kids, and your career and stuff? Aren't you worried about creating a paradox?"

"No," the other Meg says. "Because I already know that your family won't be the same as my family. I don't think my choices constrain yours at all." She hesitates, and then comes forward to stand next to Meg, picking up the black and white photograph. "These are my brothers," she tells Meg. "Charles Wallace on the end, and the twins, Sandy and Dennys, in the middle."

"Oh," Meg says. It feels inadequate. She has no idea what you say to someone who has found out that two of their brothers didn't exist in another timeline. She would feel horrible, she thinks, if someone told her there was another Meg who didn't have a Charles Wallace. She almost feels guilty, like she had personally decided the twins were expendable.

"We're not forks," the other Meg says. "I think we're more like separate streams that happened to run parallel for a bit. Anyways, I came out here to tell you that my mother's calmed down, and she's sitting at the dining table eating soup, and there's enough for you if you want some."

"Okay," Meg says.

It's a little strange to go into the dining room and see the very old woman and know that she's Dr. Kate Murry, renowned scientist and, in some once-removed sense, Meg's mother. The soup helps, when the other Meg serves her a bowl; it's hot and salty, full of greens and herbs and tiny dots of pasta. The other Meg sits down across from her with her own bowl, Dr. Murry at the head of the table between them.

"I don't remember cooking this," Dr. Murry says, between mouthfuls of soup, "But it's very good, don't you think?"

"It's delicious," Meg says. "Thank you."

"The twins will probably devour the rest when they get home," Dr. Murry says. "I may have to invent a new branch of physics to understand where teenaged boys put all the food they eat, it just doesn't seem possible sometimes."

"Multidimensional stomach expansion," Meg says, trying not to overthink it, trying to just joke around like she would with her own mother.

"Packed into the mitochondrial matrix," Dr. Murry responds. "Meg, I was thinking, what if you tried to model the global economy as an organism, and all the business about imports and exports as intercellular trafficking? Would that help it make more sense?"

"Um," Meg says. "Maybe?"

"I don't think they teach imports and exports much any more," the other Meg puts in.

"Oh," Dr. Murry says. "I think Polly told us that, when she was here to study."

She looks back and forth between the two Megs for a moment. "Oh," she says again. "Little Meg and big Meg. Well. This is nice." She takes another spoonful of soup, apparently unconcerned.

"Hi, Mother," the other Meg says softly.

Dr. Murry puts down her spoon.

"If you completely reengineered a protein," she says, "and it still performed its primary function, there might still be secondary or tertiary partners that couldn't recognize it. Right?"

The other Meg nods.

"So," Dr. Murry says, like this is conclusive. "Clever thought with the dimerization."

"Mother," the other Meg says, with an urgent note in her voice. "Do you think you would do better somewhere else? Because there have been so many different gates and tesseracts here? Do you think it would be easier to keep track of _now_ somewhere not so close to the _thens_?"

"With the dementia, you mean?" Dr. Murry shakes her head slowly. "Oh, Meg, I think I just got old." She says it like it's still, on some level, surprising to her. "I do enjoy the little glimpses of Alex and you and your brothers. But, aside from that, I think it would be harder somewhere I didn't recognize. I don't think I could learn somewhere new."

"You know Charles Wallace can find you wherever you are," the other Meg says, one last line of argument.

"I know," Dr. Murry says. "But I think here will do well enough. If you don't mind it too much."

"I don't," the other Meg says, a little choked up.

"I'm so proud of you," Dr. Murry says, reaching over and taking her hand. "You've done so well, and so much."

The other Meg is definitely crying now, and Meg has to turn away; it's too embarrassing watching other people's emotional scenes. She would really like to get up from the table but she's not sure if Dr. Murry's lucidity will last if she leaves the room. She sits there awkwardly doing exponents in her head, trying not to pay attention to the expressions of love behind her, until she's saved by Andrea bouncing in.

"All right, Mrs. O'Keefe," she says cheerfully. "I flipped the laundry; want me to get the dinnertime meds before I head out?"

"That would be great," the other Meg says, or at least Meg thinks it's something like that; she's not entirely sure she can hear over the static that seems to be filling her entire brain.

"Did she call you _Mrs. O'Keefe?_ " Meg asks when Andrea bounces out again. "Did you... did you _marry Calvin_??"

The other Meg puts her hand up to her face; she's grinning in a way that might be meant to be apologetic but honestly mostly looks pleased.

"You had six children with _Calvin_ ," Meg says. "You let _Calvin_ take credit for your work together."

"Seven, actually," the other Meg says. Dr. Murry is watching this with the fascinated eyes of someone watching a chess match, or maybe a small controlled detonation. "And there were... reasons we thought it was best to leave me off of those papers. Security concerns."

Meg is totally not ready to process the reality of any version of herself having chosen to have _seven children_ with Calvin O'Keefe. _I guess nobody gave them a condom_ , she thinks hysterically.

"Meg, go talk to Meg before her mind implodes," Dr. Murry says, flapping her hand at them. "I'll be fine with Andrea, and Andrea will just be confused if she hears you two talking."

Meg gets up numbly and follows the other Meg out to the porch, where there's a heavily-cushioned porch swing. The other Meg sits down at one end and Meg sits down at the other.

"That was your Calvin," Meg says. "The red-haired man in that picture."

"That's my Calvin," the other Meg says. She's still smiling a little, like she can't help it.

"He looks..." _old_ , Meg thinks. "Nice."

"I always thought so," the other Meg says, and then schools her face into something more serious. "Look. I meant what I said: I don't think my choices constrain your choices at all. You could marry your Calvin. You could not marry your Calvin. You could marry your Veronica, if you're wrong about who she's jealous of." She ignores Meg's incredulous face. "All I know is that you deserve love, and you deserve happiness, and that you're capable of finding them."

"Probably not in middle school," Meg says bitterly.

"I'm not sure anyone is happy in middle school," the other Meg says. "Do you have a swim team? Sometimes the water helps, I think."

Meg blinks at her. "We don't have a swim team," she says.

"The beach, maybe," the other Meg shrugs. "Just a thought."

"I have no idea how I'm ever going to look Calvin in the face again," Meg moans, getting back to the essentials here. "It was already bad, but this is so much worse." She puts her face in her hands and they just sit there for a moment, swinging gently.

"I thought about whether I could share any of my... peace of mind," the other Meg says, into the silence. "I don't know how many times I've thought 'if I could just go back and give my younger self a little bit of my perspective, a little bit of my understanding of myself.' But unfortunately I don't think it works that way. I've seen and done too much that wouldn't make any sense to you, or that you should get to experience entirely for yourself."

That's fair - middle school is awful, but Meg isn't sure she's ready for old-lady feelings, either.

"But..." the other Meg says slowly. "I noticed something, in our kythe. I was able to kythe a lot more from you than you were from me," she says, a little apologetically. "You never went to Ixchel?"

"Ixchel?" Meg says. "No. My dad did. The Happy Medium showed us."

The other Meg holds out her hand. "This is a memory," she says. "When we got my father back... when we went to Camazotz... we fell back to Ixchel, before I went back in and got Charles Wallace out. It was part of what I brought with me against the IT. I don't know how it would change you, to remember it - you saved your Charles Wallace without it. But for me, it's a memory that has only ever brought me good things."

"Good things?"

"Comfort, and peace, and joy, and strength." The other Meg is still holding out her hand. It's an old person's hand, bony and veiny and wrinkled; she wears a gold wedding ring.

Meg reaches out and takes it.

There's an instance of pain, and then softness. A smell of flowers. She is held by something warm, and soft, and enveloping, something covered in fur that almost seems like it should melt to her touch. There is safety, and rest, and music - she feels like she can't remember the music quite right, but she can remember how it feels. It feels like flying, like stars, like a brilliant, beautiful tesseract.

"Oh, there's Aunt Beast," she remembers the Happy Medium saying, and she remembers the beast saying _you think of such odd words about me. Aunt. Maybe. Beast. That will do._

She remembers trying to explain vision to a being with no eyes, and unconditional love, so much love, that never flinched from her fear and her anger.

She opens her eyes, and realizes the other Meg has let go of her hand.

"That may have been a little muddled," the other Meg says. "You might be just the right age for it, but it was a very long time ago for me."

"It was beautiful," Meg says. "And - very personal, wasn't it." There was a feeling in the memory of being intensely in her body, and a feeling of being alone together with the beast, of intimacy without any kind of observation or interference.

"Who better to share it with than my parallel self," the other Meg says, smiling gently. "Well, I think you're ready."

"Ready?"

"To tesser back," the other Meg says. "You may not have used a tesseract to get here, but if you focus on your Charles Wallace, you should be able to use one to get back."

"Oh," Meg says. "Yes, I see. From the star-watching rock?"

"If you like," the other Meg says.

They walk one more time through the spruces, over the stone wall, through the fields and the two tall rocks. Meg feels aware of things she hadn't noticed before - apple trees, a fern in the shadow of the wall, the little grasshoppers in the grass.

"Charles Wallace would like it here," she says, not really thinking about it.

"He does," the other Meg says.

And then they're back at the large flat rock.

"I can't thank you enough," the other Meg says. "When my mother - "

"Hey," Meg says, before this can get too weepy again. "I'm glad it worked." She hesitates for a moment, hoping this doesn't come out wrong. "I don't know if you could see this, but my Charles Wallace... we adopted him. We're not birth siblings."

"I didn't see that," the other Meg says, a little blankly.

"So, I just thought... my Sandy and Dennys. They could still be out there somewhere, and we just haven't met them yet. But maybe we'll find them and they'll still end up being my brothers."

"Oh," the other Meg says. "I never... I never thought of that." She thinks for a moment. "You know, it would make a lot of sense. If they were survivors, or refugees, something like that, and that's what drew them back to - " She cuts herself off. "Well, they wouldn't tell you that story for years yet."

Meg shakes her head.

The tesseract is easy to start and easy to step through; her backyard is right next door, in one direction at least. The last thing she sees is the other Meg smiling at her, until she steps out onto her own lawn, right next to the geodesic climbing dome, where the beach mat is still lying unrolled. The sky is a little darker than it had been.

Meg reaches into the dome and retrieves and rolls up the beach mat. When she goes inside, she sees that her dad and Charles Wallace have started making dinner, or at least there's a pot of boiling water on the stove that promises pasta if nobody gets distracted. She can hear her mother on the phone in the office, dealing with some piece of the slow bureaucracy required to officially reinstate their dad into their lives, or maybe talking to a collaborator or booking telescope time or who knows what. Meg doesn't go and interrupt her but she makes a silent promise to hug her once she's off the phone.

Alone, in her own room, on her own bed, Meg lets herself consider the question of Calvin.

In one way, it's terrifying to have confirmation that liking Calvin could be the first step on a road to grown-up things like sex, marriage, and babies. In another way, it's quietly exhilarating to know that whole vein of possibility might be there. At least to the extent of surviving some bad weeks of middle school, which feels like enough right now.

Really, she supposes, she doesn't know anything she didn't know before. Nothing is ruled out that she had thought was in question, and nothing is proven, either. But maybe that makes sense.

"If the future was fixed," she says out loud, tracing a line in the air, "Then..." She can't quite formulate it, why it seems like it would break things, right at the point where the past and future had to touch, but it's there as an intuition, like her number-sense waking up and telling her there's a computation error somewhere.

"If my dad guaranteed things," she tries, lifting her other hand and angling her fingers at each other. "You can't lock it in from either side, because... not flexagons, but _flexion_... the inflection point..."

She moves her hands a little and she's lost it, the math that was almost there slipping away, but she still has the feeling of it. Her dad can't fix everything perfectly, permanently, because that would be like Camazotz, just like if her life now had to follow the other Meg's exactly. But on Ixchel, she - the other she - had felt a different kind of absolute. A reduction to simpler terms, to essentials. For a little while, the other Meg had just sort of... floated in the inflection point, warm and loved. And then she had gone back to Camazotz.

"Okay," Meg says, to herself, and goes back downstairs to see if anyone remembered to put the pasta in the water. 

**

The next morning Meg walks to school with Charles Wallace, like she usually does. Charles Wallace is obviously aware that something happened to her; he's been shooting her bright, interested grins since dinner, and might as well be holding a sign that says "I am unnaturally patient for a kid my age but I look forward to hearing about it whenever you want to tell me already". She's going to tell him, although it feels like a lot, the idea of their mother getting confused like that, and their maybe-missing brothers. She's even going to tell him the part about Calvin, because he'll just keep looking expectantly at her if she leaves things out.

She's not going to tell _Calvin_ that part, not for a long, long time. Maybe it would be easiest not to tell him any of it, but she wants to; she likes the idea of telling him things, and she can just picture the way his eyes will - well, it'll probably be a good reaction, she thinks.

She tells Charles Wallace to have a good day and promises him a conversation on the way home from school. She starts looking for Calvin before she even goes to her locker - when she spots him, she can tell he was watching for her too, although he doesn't approach her. (He hasn't since the time the other day when she had bolted away from him after school without looking and nearly been hit by a bus pulling out of the parking lot.) He looks sad when he spots her, and suddenly much happier when she heads right towards him.

"This week has been a roller coaster," Meg says, "And not in the cool physics way. If you come sit with me at lunch, will you let me tell you about it?"

"Of course," Calvin says. His eyes are maybe already kind of doing the thing. It's pretty great.

Meg takes his hand, right there with Veronica and who knows who else probably watching. They might tease her - they probably will tease her; all kinds of hard things are just going to keep on happening. None of them can cancel this out. Calvin's hand is warm, and the universe is big and surprising, and the things that matter aren't negated by the rest.

**Author's Note:**

> I loved the movie when I saw it and I've loved (and struggled with) book-Meg for over 30 years now. I knew as soon as I saw the trailer that I wanted to write something around the idea of who gets to be "the real Meg Murry" and what those stories mean or don't mean for each other.
> 
> Many thanks to my beta Carpenter; I ignored most of her good advice and then rewrote the entire ending without ever showing it to her, sorry. But I couldn't have figured out what was wrong with the ending without our conversation about it, and I wouldn't have known what I wanted to do with Dr. Murry without her comments on the movie. This story means a lot to me and she made it so much better.


End file.
